Burial ground, Calliaghstown Lower, Co. Dublin

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Burial Grounds

Burial ground, Calliaghstown Lower, Co. Dublin

On the western slope of Saggart Hill in County Dublin, there is a burial ground that gives no outward sign of its existence.

No headstones, no enclosing wall, no earthwork. The ground simply looks like ground, and yet human remains have been turned up here during building works, along with a holy water font, suggesting that what now appears to be an ordinary hillside was once a place of some religious and funerary significance.

The site is associated with Slademore Lodge, a house that was noted in the Ordnance Survey Letters of 1837 as occupying the location of a former burial ground, a connection recorded by Herity in 2001. The property itself has a more distant ecclesiastical history: it belonged to St. Mary de Hogges, a Hiberno-Norse Benedictine nunnery founded in Dublin, which held lands across a wide area of the county during the medieval period. The discovery of a holy water font points to the likelihood of a religious structure somewhere nearby, though no remains of any building have been identified above ground. Pre-development archaeological testing carried out in 2003 did produce some physical evidence, including a clay-bonded structure and a metalled surface, the kind of compacted, stone-laid ground associated with pathways or activity areas, but the full picture of what once stood here remains unclear.

There is nothing to see at the site in the conventional sense, and that is rather the point. The area around Saggart Hill is accessible and the wider landscape repays attention for anyone interested in the medieval geography of south County Dublin, but a visit to this particular spot demands a tolerance for absence. The significance lies in what the documentary and archaeological record quietly implies rather than anything the eye can settle on.

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